Occupy Baltimore: A Linguistic Landscape Analysis of Participatory Social Contestation in an American City

Abstract

Linguistic landscape research is based on the idea that social phenomena are quickly reflected in the visible and semantically meaningful humanly constructed environments within which people live and work. As a research project, the initial interest of linguistic landscape research in the role of explicitly marked signs reflective of multicultural and multilingual interactions (Backhaus, 2005; Landry and Bourhis, 1997) quickly evolved into an interest in social conflict. Prior research, such as Hanauer’s (2011) investigation of graffiti on the separation wall between Israel and the occupied West Bank, has shown how sensitive linguistic landscape research can be in explicating the meanings and discourses present within areas of conflict. As pointed out by Palmer (1999) ‘landscapes are able to contain and convey multiple and often conflicting sets of shared meanings’ (p. 317). More importantly, as clearly seen in ideological analyses of environmental texts, landscapes can be ‘contested and appropriated in symbolic ways and invested with meanings as sites of resistance and struggle’ (Philip and Mercer, 2002, p. 1587).